I remember watching Dan Olson/Folding Ideas' video about the creepy reactionary core of the Gators' ideas and movement, and thinking about how eerily the whole attitude towards gender, race, and sexual orientation exhibited by such folk mirrors Wagner's proposed "annihilation" of Jewishness—which is to say, mass self-abnegation and total cultural assimilation rather than literal extermination. (Translating blustery German Romantics "literally" is an extremely bad idea; the basic principle is alarming enough.)

This article makes a good case that, despite all the bluster about free speech from that quarter, Gamergate is a moral crusade mounted for the sake of defending an orthodox model of what games should be like and about.

Word on the internet is that Alan Rickman - best known in my family as Dr. Lazarus/Alexander Dane from Galaxy Quest, and to the rest of the world as Severus Snape from the Harry Potter films - has died. Sad news, even when he was in works unworthy of his talent (Harry Potter, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie) he managed to elevate the material and turn in an engagingly entertaining performance.

Slightly orthogonal to this, but attempting to finish Undertale in two days (and ultimately failing to do so) utterly devastated my already awful sleep cycle and has... ultimately flipped it around so that I am awake during the day again. How very odd.

I think that there are studies to the effect that gaming, television, and other backlit screen activities tend to be antithetical to the kind of mindset most people need for healthy sleep, but that really doesn't change the fact that having some knowledge and involvement in such interests makes it far easier to say when things need to be put down in the first place. To whit, giving some leeway now and then can reinforce a mutual understanding regarding things like healthy sleep schedules.

Or such is my entirely secondhand experience in the matter. I am well-aware that I am nowhere near stable or mature enough at this juncture to handle having a child, let alone one anything like me, even if observation has given me some ideas about how I might be able to survive the ordeal.

Some bias comes from proximity, sure, but I don't think it's necessarily wrong that that is the case

@Arthur: I didn't really intend to suggest it was a problem, sorry for any ambiguity. I was just thinking about possible causes and explanations. "My neighbours will be ticked off, social harmony will decrease and I may experience uncomfortable interactions" isn't a bad reason for caring more about potentially disrupting an adult friend's game versus some stranger in another country.

Perhaps it is a sign that I would be a bad parent but my instinctive response to "I just need to finish this one thing" at bedtime would be "Well, you should have started it earlier then".

No, that sounds about right. But of course some parents, maybe even a substantial part, might well be clueless for a number of reasons. But parents who are gamers will of course realize what's what. And hopefully impart manners to their children for gaming and other online related activities as well. I don't play that much anymore myself, but I'm lookoing forward to playing with my children, when they get older. The older is quite good at Mario Kart and it adds a new mode to the game, guarding and helping another driver to finish as high as possible, which is pretty interesting. Having to snipe the other karts and push them off the road.

I think it's possible to overestimate the cluelessness of parents in this case, coming as many of us do from a generation whose parents generally didn't know much about videogames. A lot of people I know who are parents of young children are in their 30s or 40s, and are of a generation who are entirely comfortable with games.

Perhaps it is a sign that I would be a bad parent but my instinctive response to "I just need to finish this one thing" at bedtime would be "Well, you should have started it earlier then".

@Shim: Some bias comes from proximity, sure, but I don't think it's necessarily wrong that that is the case. It is true enough that obnoxious behaviour online is still hurtful and you should still treat people like human beings even if you only know them as words on a screen. At the same time, it's eminently easier to block a specific individual acting like a dick online, whereas if someone lives in the same house from you then their bad habits are going to have a correspondingly greater effect on you simply because you can't get away from them.

(Obviously, it is possible for randoms on the internet to do great harm - see what happened with Gamergate. But Gamergate did the damage it did primarily through the sheer quantity of people undertaking the harassment campaign. One person yelling insults at you online is eminently blockable; a hundred is a true pain. And the more alarming bits happened when some people shifted from distant online name calling to direct, credible threats of violence - which, of course, involves taking things to a radically closer proximity.)

That being the case, I don't think it's wrong, irrational, or even a problem to put doing right by the people you actually live with ahead of doing right by comparative strangers you only know through an online game, and part of doing right by the people you're living with involves abiding by the house rules.

Perhaps what is needed in general is parents to get involved and clear rules set out for the kids. Games are no doubt a foreign thing for many parents and thus less serious than a game of football or other such social games, which are more of a known quantity. But things which are more familiar to people still have set rules. Games and sports are played in the evenings or during the day, not in the middle of the night, so even if people from around the world might play, local time must be a factor. But I'm sure that things will start to work out when gaming continues its steady progress towards being a perfectly common thing. Perhaps game companies and groups could even encourage this by tying to involve the parents and setting up games with rules taking into account the needs of growing children. Might be a good marketing opportunity and an opportunity to hook up some more people to these games.

In Arthur's thought examples, I would think that parents would be well advised to keep themselves in someway appraised of the games played. Even a four year old will try the old plot that they will "just finish this one thing", even if the thing will go on for hours and they will lie happily to achieve that goal. Which is a perfectly normal thing to do, but one has to stay sharp as a counter-measure.

I tend to agree with Janne, having much the same experience, and pretty good anecdotal-experimental evidence that maintaining good sleep patterns keeps me brain under control. Which makes me tremendous fun at parties.

The annoying thing is that, like most of these things, it's super easy to ignore what you know to be sensible and stay up all night reading the internet.

Coming back to the article, I feel like online games are in a funny place. Most parents will interrupt what kids are doing to enforce [important thing X] Time, including stopping them playing with their friends, or reading, or making them come home. Friends is probably the closest analogy because it's the only one where you're affecting third parties. But if a child has agreed to play a game of football just before tea, my observation is that football generally loses out.

I'd suggest that there's several things going on. One is that parents prioritise, and Fun Stuff is generally low priority. I'm also confident that many people do see computer games as less real and therefore less important.

Also, proximity is a well-attested point of bias. When you stop a child's online game, you're affecting people you've never met and never will, probably far away; psychologically you care much less about them. If it were a game with other local kids, it would most likely seem more important. If it were a game with adults the parent knew, it would seem more important again - adults are higher status, we tend to subconsciously care more about them, and we're more likely to feel bad about ruining their scarce leisure time. Plus we're more likely to be bothered if they're ticked off at us.

The other thing is that LoL is a quite weird thing, in that it's a leisure activity requiring a group of people for a set (but variable) amount of time. Most leisure activities can be stopped at any point, and either are solo or it doesn't make a huge difference if someone drops out. I suspect maybe it's rare enough that nobody's really comfortable dealing with that situation?

On gaming and bedtimes. A child needs it sleep, even if the child is a teenager. Sleep deprivation is linked to learning difficulties and even disabilities, which may limit the child's opportunities in their adulthood. There is robust empirical evidence for this (and I have personal experience of sleep deprivation triggering depression and anxiety in an adult, so good habits in taking care of sleeping will stay valuable). So, a parent that does not take care of their child's need for sleep is neglecting their duties as a parent in providing for their future and this I think, is a bigger concern in this issue than anything else.

Of course how this rest period is enforced can be done in a good or poor way and all sorts of other issues should be taken into account between parent and child, including clear rules for gaming.

And I don't want to sound too strict, since enforcing bedtime rules is pretty simple(a war of attrition mostly) in the case of a four year-old and I just might drop the ball entirely in ten years time, if the kid stays as stubborn as she is now, but the goal and responsibilities of the parent are still pretty straightforward, enough to override most other considerations.

Blackstar the album reminds me in parts of a sort of better-polished and more interesting take on Outside, if Outside had been recorded in a parallel universe where Bowie and Eno weren't trying so hard to ride the Nine Inch Nails bandwagon.

Eno mentioned today that he and Bowie had been trading ideas for about a year on how to revisit Outside and I kind of hope Eno tackles the project despite this, ah, minor setback. If anyone can delve into hundreds of hours of experimental recordings and extract true gold from them, it's Eno.

it could be that LoL doesn't allow you to be choosy about who you play with but simply teams you up with utter randoms...

inconvenience some random strangers and cause a mild dip in their game statisticsThe analogy to an MMO raid is misleading you, because a raid is a "PvE" exercise, but League of Legends is strictly PVP.

In League of Legends, you can choose your teammates, but you can't choose your opponents, and you are dependent on both if you want to have a good time. It's not about winning or losing. If I'm 20 minutes in to a tense match, having an enemy quit is as frustrating as losing an ally.

(Incidentally, it would make sense if you want to fit it into the narrative of confronting death, given that Walker's work is very much about that, particularly on The Drift or any of his recent albums which the track most clearly draws upon, although his whole solo career had a strong morbid introspective streak from the outset. Bowie was apparently also listening to a lot of Kendrick Lamar Death Grips when he was recording the album, which... I don't know what that says, other than that the man had good musical taste.)

"Blackstar" is very Scott Walker-y, to the point that I would almost call it an outright pastiche of Walker's style in Bowie's terms. I have, however, not heard the rest of the album, so I will reserve judgement, but even with that said, I love Walker and Bowie, so one riffing on the other is actually kind of boss.

Ever review of the album mentioned his comebacks, reinventions and rebirths. I guess it was his last great redefinition. So very Bowie-like to leave with a goodbye like that. I hope he has a pleasant journey, wherever we all finally go.

I shit you not, when I heard the new album Friday evening I did wonder whether it was Bowie's way of telling us he was dying. In retrospect the lyrics (and the associated music videos) couldn't be clearer.